The Hilltop Review
Volume 8
Issue 2 Spring 2016
Article 15
May 2016
More than One Way to Measure: Masculinity in
the Zurkaneh of Safavid Iran
Zachary T. Smith
Western Michigan University
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78
More than One Way to Measure: Masculinity in Zurkhaneh of
Safavid Iran
Winner, 2016 Graduate Humanities Conference
By Zachary Smith
Department of Comparative Religion
[email protected]
The zurkhaneh is a uniquely Iranian institution that claims a social history extending at
least back to the time of the Safavid Empire. The closest modern corollary is the gym where
wrestlers trained and competed, though the activity of the zurkhaneh was much more highly
structured than modern gymns. While the zurkhaneh has undergone a substantial amount of
change from then until now, the ethos of the zurkhaneh has remained relatively untouched.
Indeed, Lloyd Ridgeon (2007) writes of the zurkhaneh as caught “between tradition and
change” describing that the modern perception of the zurkhaneh is of “an old Iranian
institution where “ancient sports” are performed in an environment of ideal masculinity and
ethical behavior in which normal social structures are transcended through processes of social
leveling (p. 243).
This ethos of manliness and manners, I suggest, is a vestige of the zurkhaneh’s history,
embedded in the structure and encoded in the logic of the institution. As such, it provides a
window into the lives of its members through a physical culture of early modern Safavid Iran,
making it possible to gain insights about the subjectivity of non-elite males as well as
understand their position in the social economy of Safavid society.
This paper will offer a sketch of the zurkhaneh, paying special attention to the physicality
and materiality of its culture and construction as well as to the significance of its embodied
practices and the authority it derives from textual practices.1 Through this sketch, I hope to
suggest that the athletic rituals of the zurkhaneh, together with the recitations of the
Shahnameh, and the valorization of Rustam, Ali, and Purya-ye Vali constitute what might be
called a cultural liturgy, a ritualized way of the formation of the whole self. As a cultural
liturgy, the practices of the zurkhaneh operated as pedagogies for the formation of both the
ethical self and the body of the zurkhaneh athlete, known as a pahlavan.
By showing how the zurkhaneh operated as a public site for the cultivation of the self this
paper attempts to theorize the zurkhaneh as a site of the construction of a subaltern
masculinity in Safavid Iran. To accomplish this, this paper will combine the themes of
publicity, the social utility of the body, and the authority of textuality with an examination of
the physical culture of the zurkhaneh to theorize the utility, representation, and experience of
1
There is a dearth of texts and images of the early modern zurkhaneh, when considering
literature available in English. Because of this, the sketch of the zurkhaneh I am working
with relies heavily on more recent descriptions offered by scholars. While these
descriptions are of the more modern zurkhaneh, it does not seem unreasonable to assume
some level of continuity with those of the early modern institution, especially an
institution so invested in tradition. Further, Luijendijk (2011) notes the continuity
between Francklin’s description from 1786 and his own modern experiences. So while
this is a less than ideal way of pursuing history, I believe there is value in attempting to
reconstruct some of this history, even if imperfectly, to try and tease out some of the
implications of the zurkhaneh as a rich site of physical and material culture for non-elite
males in the time of Safavid Iran.
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Zachary Smith
79
non-elite male bodies in early modern Safavid Iran. Insights gleaned from this will be applied
to theories about the subjectivity of male commoners in early modern Indo-Persianate society
and juxtaposed against scholars like O’Hanlon (1999) who take masculine modes of
comportment as a construction of the imperial court for managing the nobility.
I will argue that though situated on the fringes of society (Rochard, 2002), the pahlavans
were able to participate in the social economy of javanmardi or “young manliness” and
masculine comportment through the cultural liturgy of the zurkhaneh. Extending this analysis
further, it will be suggested that the physical strength of the pahlavans publicly marked their
masculinity in a way that connoted the strong man with the ideal of “young manliness,” and
this combination inscribed and invested authority into and upon the bodies of the pahlavans.
Observing the political utility of the pahlavans and the participation of certain nobles in the
practice of the zurkhaneh it is possible to show at least one way that the construction of
Persian masculinity occurred non-hierarchically.
Situating an Indo-Persianate Masculinity
In her article on Mughal masculinity, O’Hanlon (1999) notes that studies of Indian history—
following trends in the humanities and social sciences more broadly—have realized the
significance of gender as a field through which to analyze society (p. 47). However as is often
the case, “gender” tends to refer to identities that are other than masculine (O’Hanlon, 1999,
p. 47). This is significant, because as O’Hanlon indicates, it has lead researchers to ignore
“men as gendered beings and gendered bodies” despite the fact that masculinity defined many
of the social ideals of early modern society (1999, p. 48).
O’Hanlon’s suggestion is that there were specific “modes of comportment” for men in
Mughal India. That is, there were specific ways of being masculine, ways that were
embodied, lived, and engendered. Necessarily, masculinity is enacted against a social
backdrop; it is a fundamentally gendered way of social being and relating, and thus of being
and relating to others. O’Hanlon’s work is concerned with the Indo-Persian discourses on
masculinity, and she adeptly shows how these discourses featured in the religious and
political economy of Mughal India. Ideal manhood is constructed in terms of kingship,
imperial service, and statecraft and O’Hanlon makes clear that the Mughal state played an
active role in shaping masculinity after the “ideal imperial servant” (1999, pp. 84-85). “These
codes,” O’Hanlon argues, “emerged in the context of a court culture which consumption and
display were important indicators of authority” (1999, p. 84). Of course, masculine modes of
comportment were composed of many complex factors, all clamoring to claim authority over
the male body. These codes were not strict, and were negotiated individually according to
personal tastes. Eventually, according to O’Hanlon, the result was that men from different
classes and stations attempted to usurp the masculine social convention to try and act like
individuals of high culture (1999, p. 84). This became problematic as these individuals
misinterpreted the codes and behaved according to unorthodox convention. Such men were
seen as imposters, and they were often accused of dressing like women. Clothes and
accessories as a function of material culture marked these men as women, or non-men, much
as physical barriers and materiality were used to mark of the harem as the property of the
emperor. Matthee (1994; 2014) make similar observations, writing of the norms of Safavid
male nobility in their navigation of taverns and coffee houses and theorizing the significance
of the two establishments and their associated beverages in terms of their level of publicity
and social status.
While analyses of these different social institutions and the modes of comportment
expected of imperial servants offer a rich picture of male life in early modern Indo-Persia, it is
a picture restricted to males that were explicitly associated with imperial courtly life. This
paper is an attempt to critique this position by offering a subaltern construction of
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More Than One Way to Measure
masculinity, showing that non-elite male “negotiation” of masculinity was a complex process
and one that was not exclusive to courtly constructions. Not only were subaltern males able to
participate in the social economy of masculinity, they were able to contribute to it.
The Zurkhaneh
The history surrounding the Iranian zurkhaneh and the pahlavans who frequented it is fraught
with ambiguity. Some scholars have advanced the notion that the zurkhaneh and its rituals
originated out of Aryan Mithraic “religion” but this evidence seems circumstantial until the
archeological record establishes otherwise.2 More recently this argument has suffered severe
criticism, causing at least one prominent scholar to claim that the Mithraic thesis has been
thoroughly debunked (Ilahi, 1994; Cited by Rochard, 2002). The nature of the pahlavans (also
known occasionally as lutis) is similarly ambiguous as these members of the zurkhaneh are
frequently associated with a range of character assumptions and activities from chivalry to
thuggery, sometimes also taking on explicit sexual connotations of homo-erotic or pederastic
activity (Floor, 1971).
Luijendijk (2011) suggests that the zurkhaneh is an Iranian institution, especially with the
symbolic belt tying practices, which are reminiscent of Zoroastrian rituals (see also Zakeri,
2009). A number of scholars find the zurkhaneh originating out of the futuwwas, especially
those that were active under the Abbasids (Hanaway, 1989; Zakeri, 2009; Luijendijk, 2011).
Chehabi (2006) acknowledges the tradition of the futuwwa in the zurkhaneh, however, he
finds the zurkhaneh to be a unique institutional development under the Safavids. Phillippe
Rochard (2002) notes this controversy, and follows the history of wrestling as a “profession”
in order to elucidate the origins of the zurkhaneh. Rochard (2002) indicates that wrestling
obtained its “letters of nobility” sometime between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, and
makes mention of several chapters on wrestling dating from the fourteenth century, including
sections of the Badayi al-Waqayi (1349/1970) and the Futuvvat-namah Sultani (1350/1971).
Rochard (2002) takes the existence of these two texts and the “professionalization” of
wrestling at this time to infer that it seems likely that the zurkhaneh was formalized as an
institution around this time—though this is somewhat speculative since the earliest known
mention of the zurkhaneh in Persian texts does not occur until the late seventeenth century (p.
321).
What is uncontested is that the zurkhanehs were a place of physical training, and that this
was a distinctly male public space frequented primarily (though not exclusively) by the lower
classes (Chardin, 1686/1988; Francklin, 1811). Taking these three seemingly obvious aspects
of the zurkhaneh and situating them within the unique milieu of early modern Safavid Iran, it
is possible to offer a reading of the zurkhaneh as a unique public site of cultural pedagogy for
early modern Persian masculinity.
The Zurkhaneh as a Public
John Hardin, in what is to date the earliest European account the zurkhaneh, writes during the
Safavid period. Hardin writes that, “wrestling [is] the exercise of people in a lower condition;
and generally speaking, only of people who are indigent” (Chardin, 1686/1988, pp. 200-201).
From this, we gather that unlike the coffee houses, madrasas, and many of the other public
institutions that are available thanks to European travelogues like Chardin’s, the zurkhaneh
was a public space primarily frequented by the lower or non-elite classes. This is not to
suggest that the nobles had nothing to do with the zurkhaneh. Chardin (1686/1988, pp. 200201) notes that it was common for noblemen to patronize a zurkhaneh with the purpose of
2
See Amirtash (2008) and Rochard (2002, p. 3) for a brief overview of these positions.
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81
“training his people,” and nineteenth century traveler Gaspard Drouville suggests that nobles
participated in the activities of the zurkhaneh (Cited by Chehabi, 2006).
This is an interesting phenomenon, because it would have violated the norms of noble or
courtly sociability. Theorizing the zurkhaneh as an alternative public, similar to the kind that
Hasan (2005) discusses in the context of Mughal India, the voluntary association of a noble
with and in a specifically lower class institution stands out. Interestingly, as Ridgeon (2007)
points out, it seems possible that some nobles associated themselves with the zurkhaneh as a
matter of social or political utility, possibly trying to associate themselves with the ideals of
javanmardi. In this way the zurkhaneh acted as a site of social leveling, and the rituals and
construction of the zurkhaneh reinforced this. Ridgeon (2007) describes the logic of the rituals
of the zurkhaneh as engendering a “loss of status, class, race…” (p. 245). As the athletes
status is checked at the door (literally, as he strips, performs ritual ablutions, and dons the
uniform apparel of the zurkhaneh) this creates the possibility of establishing a new social
order inside of the zurkhaneh, where social status is achieved through the merits of physical
ability and moral comportment (Ridgeon, 2007). As an alternative public, the zurkhaneh
enabled its participants a means through which to exercise their own subjectivity, even in the
presence of nobility while also allowing them to demarcate the boundaries of their discursive
community.
The power of the zurkhaneh as an alternative public and social institution in its own right
can be observed in its patronage. Local officials and even kings patronized the zurkhaneh, and
used them as a means by which to maintain order in the neighborhoods of the city (Luijendijk,
2011). Local wrestling heroes could be viewed as Robin Hoods or local mobsters, depending
on their affiliation and activity. Significantly, such affiliation was varied—Luijendijk (2011)
notes that along with merchants and artisans, both Sufis and “ruffians” frequented the
zurkhaneh.
Schools of Bodies, Schools of Virtues
Perhaps the most notable aspect of the zurkhaneh is its ideal of javanmardi, or ethos of young
manliness, closely associated with what might be conceived as a kind of “chivalry.” As
O’Hanlon (1999) notes, the notion of javanmardi would have been widely known and
circulated during the Safavid empire, and implied a wide range of both physical, material,
social, and spiritual affectations.
Daud Ali (2004) offers a similar analysis of courtly culture in early medieval India
writing that, “moral action was not simply a matter of following rules and ethical norms, but
also in developing an ethical sensibility” (p. 91). Ali borrows from Foucault to develop this
ethical sensibility as it is expressed in early medieval Indian treatises, suggesting that these
treatises operated in a “‘subjectivising’ manner… enjoining individuals to constitute
themselves as ‘subjects’ of ethical conduct” (2004, p. 92). Significantly, much of the
remainder of Ali’s book presents the ways in which physical and material cultures contributed
to the formation of this ethical sensibility in the courtly life of early medieval India.
Though the Safavid Empire was several centuries and some geographical distance from
the time in which Ali’s work is set, he introduces Foucault’s theoretical framework in a
redolent way by coupling it with explorations of physical and material cultures. These tools
can be put to further use when coupled with Foucault’s (1979) observations in Discipline and
Punish as to how bodies become sites of knowledge and power through political
“technologies of the body.” It is important to note that while Foucault focuses on the
disciplining of the public through the spectacle of public punishment and the corporeal forms
of capital punishment and torture, these technologies may also involve non-violent yet
nonetheless strategic technologies of the body. In describing the “political technology of the
body” as a strategy, Foucault’s work is not only relevant to studying the penal system but can
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also be applied to other institutional deployments of these technologies. This is possible
because these “technologies” or “strategies” are not specific to any institution or state;
instead, each institution “select or impose certain of its methods” (Foucault, 1979, p. 26).
Hasan has written that, “We are… ignorant about the complex mechanisms through
which discursive sites, communities and identities were established and destroyed, and their
significance in the overall organization of socioeconomic life” (2005, p. 84). But by adopting
Foucault’s conceptual toolset, it is possible to theorize the zurkhaneh in terms of a technology
of ethical selfhood, which sought not only to form ideal bodies but also to impart virtuous
character and even a more general ethical sensibility. In doing so, it is possible to contribute to
the picture of discursive and communal identity formation that Hasan refers to, even if only in
one small way. As an alternative public, it is possible to view the zurkhaneh as a place of
place of non-elite male subjectivity through which the ideal of young manliness operated as a
social leveler, enabling nobles and peasant men alike the opportunity to seek the ideal of
javanmardi and participate in the social economy. To support this idea, this paper will only
briefly consider the architecture, geographical location, and interior design of the physical
structure of the zurkhaneh as well as the textuality and musicality lead by the morshed, and
how these interact with the physical and embodied practices of the athletes.
The Construction of Space
The zurkhaneh seems to have been a common feature of the bazaar, located alongside of
coffee houses, taverns, and madrasas in the center of the city (Rochard, 2002). Such a
location reflects that the zurkhaneh was both a popular and central structure to urban life in
early modern Safavid Iran, and bolsters the notion that it operated within the mainstream of
the public sphere. Babi Rahimi’s work on early modern publics supports this idea, and he
specifically mentions the zurkhaneh along with public baths, the bazaar, and coffee houses
when he writes that “this ritual spatialization identified a type of public characterized as an
informal sphere of civic cultures and cognitive networks of relations” (2012, p. 13).
The actual structure of the zurkhaneh possesses a number of features reminiscent of a
sacred space, and the features work together to act upon and physically orient the body of the
pahlavan. The first feature evident is that there is one single entrance to the zurkhaneh,
purposefully built so that anyone entering is obliged to duck down, and with a set of racks for
shoes (Luijendijk, 2011). No one is allowed to enter with shoes on, reinforcing an aura of awe
in the zurkhaneh. By forcing a prostrated position upon entrance the subject is compelled into
a posture of humility, and thus forced to embody—or at least enact—the virtues of humility
and respect (Chehabi, 2006; Luijendijk, 2011).
Another feature is the interior organization and decoration of the space. Situated near the
entrance is the sardam, which an elevated platform where an individual known as the
morshed leads the exercises from (Luijendijk, 2011). The sardam carries the same symbolic
meaning as a lectern or pulpit in a modern church, a space that serves to set apart the morshed
from the participants as well as to focus their attention both on him and on the texts which he
is reading. Subtly, the sardam reinforces the centrality and authority of these texts by
elevating the platform from which they emanate.
At the center of the space is the gowd, which is octagonal and is recessed into the floor
(Luijendijk, 2011). This is the area where the exercises take place, the central stage of the
zurkhaneh. Significantly, the athletes arrange themselves around a senior practitioner called
the miandar who stands in the center of the gowd and leads the exercises in conjunction with
the morshed (Luijendijk, 2011). This arrangement reinforces hierarchical notions of authority
and invests the miandar with a sort of power as the rest of the athletes revolve around his
center.
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The walls of the zurkhaneh are covered with pictures and photos of past athletes and
saints, taken to be exemplars both in terms of physical and moral prowess (Partow Bayżāʾi,
pp. 35-3; Luijendijk, 2011). Portraits of Rustam, Ali, and Purya-ye Vali are quite common,
and these photos function as icons of ideal young manliness, fit of body and capable of
superhuman feats of strength while also possessing superior moral virtue. Rustam is
considered a hero, the equivalent of the Greek Odysseus of Homer’s Iliad, and functions as a
mythical hero of Persian culture. Purya-ye Vali is also often recognized as a hero tied to the
founding of the zurkhaneh, and poetry attributed to him essentially problematizes hierarchical
understandings of masculinity—the lines of one quatrain attributed to him read, “… Study
baseness when in search of grace. Since the water you drink from the ground is never high
up” (N. Tabor, personal communication, December 22, 2016). The figures represent the ideal
that all the members of the zurkhaneh aspire to, and give faces to the heroes in the epic poetry
that the morshed recites during the exercises. These portraits and pictures help to anchor the
members of the zurkhaneh in the history and tradition of young manliness, providing them
with role models as well as offering something to attain and aspire to in their own practice.
Authority, Textuality, and Embodiment in Practice
Bashir writes that “the body as an artifact [is] constructed at the conjunction of ideological
and material factors… in various socio-historical contexts” (2010, p. 73). Fusing together the
idea of textuality and body, we can thus look at the body as a text, or as Bashir offers, as a
kind of tool that is “implicated in… human attempts to construct knowledge” (2010, p. 73).
Through the reading of bodies we can come to understand better the ways that these texts
interact with bodies. We can observe what types of “tools” bodies are posed as and can in turn
interpret the ways that they are used. Thus it is possible to “read” how texts enact themselves
on bodies, or even, as Bashir suggests, the way that certain doctrinal elements of texts
“encode” the body of the subject (2010, p. 72).
Within the zurkhaneh, the morshed is the individual who guides the overall ethos and
direction of the practice. The morshed does this by reading or reciting texts from the
shanameh as well as other hero and epic poems, some steeped in tradition like the shanameh
and others of more modern origin. Chehabi (2006) cites poems by Sa‘adi, Hafez, Rumi, and
Ferdowsi and also notes that there was “a type of mathnawi specific to the zurkhaneh, the gole koshti (‘flower of wrestling’), of which the most famous is that of Mir Najat Esfahani.”
According to Luijindjek (2011), the lyrics serve an “educational purpose… as a guide and
motivation to accomplish the path of the javanmardi” (p. 105). Others have noted that the one
of the most common recitations is of the section of the Shahnameh, which features Rustam’s
heroic exploits (Bahmanesh, 1993).
Rustam is often viewed as the father of the zurkhaneh, just as he is one of the fathers of
Iran. The story of Rustam grounds the practice of the zurkhaneh in Iranian history and roots
its practices in a kind of “hero practice.” The content of the lyrics serve to provide the
zurkhaneh with a history and a culture as well as operates as an “authority,” as texts often do,
for the practice of the zurkhaneh.3
Musicality: Bridging body and text
Significantly, these lyrics are accompanied with music. Musically, the morshed plays a drum
and bells accompanying the poetry (Kiani & Faraji, 2011). The drumming serves to set the
3
Lloyd Ridgeon looks at the Shia, Sufi, and Iranian symbolism in detail and notes how
stories about these heroes reinforce different ideologies. For example, he suggests that
references and veneration of Ali take on a strong nationalistic Shia flavor.
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tempo of the exercises, thus creating a motivational frame for the exercises as well as helping
to push the athletes harder than they would train on their own (Luijendijk, 2011). As the
athletes reach a state of what Csikszentmihályi (1996; Jackson & Csikszentmihályi, 1999) and
modern sports psychologists refer to as “flow”—a liminal state sometimes referred to as
“being in the zone”—practitioners were supposed to achieve a temporary state of mental and
emotional purity. And while it is the morshed actually performing this music, the tempo is
actually dictated by the miandar, standing in the center of the gowd and the other athletes.
The connection here between body, text, and music is striking and multi-directional,
working together to create what Henning Eichburg (2014) calls a palpable “energy.” This
energy is physical and physiological as well as social and psychological. Eichburg (2014)
notes that studies of body cultures tend to focus on bodies constituted in space and time; but
he suggests that this is too limiting and posits that attending to the “energy” of bodies and
between bodies can help to illuminate important features in the theory of movement science
and bodily cultures by looking at “a field outside narrow space-time rationality” (p. 244). In
this way body, music, and text work in concert to create the ethos and energy of the
zurkhaneh. The morshed performs the music and poetry, but relies on the miandar, an athlete
and the trainer of athlete bodies to dictate the pace of play. Working in the other direction, the
text and music work together not only to frame the “ethos” of the zurkhaneh, but also to frame
the bodies of the athletes.4
The zurkhaneh provided a way for men, both nobles and peasants alike, to pursue the
goal of javanmardi, which was an ideal that transcended class or status categories. Such an
egalitarian ideal pervaded the entire ethos of the zurkhaneh creating the possibility for a
subjectivity of non-elite male practitioners and establishing the zurkhaneh as a place of social
leveling. Islamic understandings of the virtues and the body contributed to this possibility as
the ideal of javanmardi was something that was cultivated through practice and the discipline
of the body and soul, marking the zurkhaneh as a technology of the body and of the self.
Taken together the physical and textual practices of the zurkhaneh aimed as they are at the
formation of the complete ethical and even spiritual self constitute a collection of ritual
activities that can be referred to as a what James Smith (2012) has termed a cultural liturgy.
The liturgy of the zurkhaneh reflected early modern Islamic understandings of the body
as a microcosm, and these musical and textual practices combined with the physical exercises
of the athletes to shape and form the fullness of their physical, moral, and ethical selves in the
fashion of young manliness. The progress of the athletes towards this ideal was marked and
recognizable through the development of the bodily physique, and physical strength became a
marker of the masculinity of the men who participated in the exercises of the zurkhaneh—in a
similar way as O’Hanlon suggests clothes and other physical and material markers did for the
men of the Indo-Persian courts. These ideal bodies of the athletes then became invested with
power as they were assumed to also possess the moral and ethical aspects attributed to the
javanmardi. This may partially explain the conscription of zurkhaneh athletes by political
leaders as well as the role of pahlavans as leaders in local neighborhoods. The authority
gained through physical prowess would have caused respect and the assumptions about the
virtues of javanmardi would have inspired trust in the pahlavans as moral and virtuous
individuals.
Significance and Conclusion
This argument acknowledges that the origins of the zurkhaneh are unknown and
ambiguous. Far from advancing the raison d'etre of the zurkhaneh, this essay seeks to
4
See Eichburg (2014, p. 246) for an overview of recent research which shows tangible
ways that drumming not only affects, but constitutes the body.
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85
understand the bodily practices of the zurkhaneh athletes and the ways in which they operated
as pedagogies of the self, forming the physical attributes of the pahlavan’s body as well as
shaping the moral and ethical self, in turn contributing to the formation of the social self and
subject. This thesis expands on both the work done on early modern conceptions of
masculinity and embodiment and offers a critique of O’Hanlon’s hierarchal notion of a courtly
Indo-Persian masculinity by suggesting the zurkhaneh as a site for the construction of a
subaltern masculinity. Acknowledging the sociopolitical import of the zurkhaneh inscribed
into the bodies of the pahlavans counters the idea of a strictly top-down flow of “true”
masculinity by showing one case where masculinity was constructed from the bottom up.
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